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THINK BETTER
NEUROSCIENCE: THE NEXT COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

Reprinted from Steelcase’s 360 magazine
Part 1
No matter how interested you
are in this article, you probably
won’t finish reading it right now,
especially if you’re at work.

Yet another urgent text will come in, you’ll get
a string of new email alerts, you’ll overhear a
colleague at the next workstation mention your
name during a videoconference so you’ll turn
your attention to what that’s all about, you’ll
still be trying to catch up on your emails when
your boss will stop by to ask about that proposal
you’ve been trying to finish all week, which will
prompt you to go online to browse for some more
information and then, since you’re online anyway
and didn’t take a lunch break and starting to feel
really resentful about the impossible amount of
the work you’re expected to do and how hard it
is to focus, you’ll stop off at Facebook and notice
that today is the birthday of your best friend from
college, so you’ll read the 73 messages she’s
received so far and then decide, what the heck,
you’ll give her a call while you’re still catching
up on email and then, before you know it, you’re
almost late for your third meeting of the day and
feeling more stressed than ever, so you’ll get a
large black coffee with an extra shot of espresso
and try to work on the proposal during the
meeting.

TOO MUCH INFORMATION

Scenarios of near-constant distraction at work
have become the norm versus the exception for
most people today. It’s well said that a wealth of
information creates a poverty of attention, and
most workers are now living that mental skirmish
every day. At the same time that we’re drowning
in information, we’re also expected to process
it faster, getting to insights, recommendations,
decisions or at least next steps rapidly. In minds
as cluttered as a scrap yard, we scramble to find
something that will “make do,” responding to the
pressure for action.

It’s well said that a wealth of information creates
a poverty of attention, and most workers are now
living that mental skirmish every day.

Yet, we long to be more effective at our jobs. We
keep telling ourselves: Just be more focused, just
work harder. But, in reality, no matter how hard we
try, our brains just don’t work that way. While our
higher-level cognitive skills distinguish us from
other mammals, being attuned to what’s going
on around us is also embedded in our evolution,
a key to survival. This means that today’s way of
working has become a Catch 22: We’re taking our
natural inclination to be distracted and training
our brains to be even more so.

An anthropologist by training, Donna leads the
global Steelcase WorkSpace Futures group, a
research team that innovates around insights
into how people work. Prior investigations into
cognitive load and the impact on people’s ability
to focus at work prompted team members to
conduct a focused learning project to uncover and
understand what neuroscience has discovered
about the brain processes of attention.

With attention meltdowns now epidemic in many
organizations, nearly everyone is struggling to
adapt, often without any real understanding of
what attention is, how it works, or how to attain
it and use it productively. Fortunately and just in
time, the research of neuroscientists in more than
40,000 labs throughout the world is shedding new light on the processes of attention and, in
so doing, providing decipherable clues into how
it can be supported in the workplace.

Thanks to the vast amount of research being
done, it’s now becoming clear that solving many
of the challenges that people face at work is
linked to getting smarter about that three-pound
organ that we all carry around in our heads.

During the past year, Steelcase researchers and
designers have been delving into the findings
of neuroscientists and cognitive researchers,
integrating discoveries from these experts with
their own ongoing investigations into workers’
behaviors and the changing nature of work.
The resulting convergence of findings has
inspired new perspectives and new ideas for
how environments, when thoughtfully designed,
can be a hardworking and effective tool to help
workers better manage their attention. And
that has all kinds of competitive advantages:
improved worker engagement and wellbeing,
more creativity and innovation, and better
business results overall.

“As demands on people’s attention grow, it is
becoming more and more important to optimize
our cognitive resources,” says Donna Flynn,
vice president of the WorkSpace Futures team.
“By studying the findings of neuroscientists,
we’re realizing that knowing more about how
our brains shape our physical, cognitive and
emotional wellbeing is bringing more clarity to
understanding human needs in the workplace.
We’re learning what we can do with all this new
science to help people think better at work.”

WHY WE’RE SO DISTRACTED?

3 minutes: How frequently the average office
worker is interrupted or distracted
University of California, Irvine

23 minutes: How long it takes to return to a task
after being interrupted
University of California, Irvine

204 million: Emails sent per minute
Mashable

8: Average number of windows open on worker’s
computer at the same time
“The Overflowing Brain: Information overload
and the limits of working memory,” Torkel
Klingberg

30: Average number of times per hour an office
worker checks their email inbox
National Center for Biotechnology Information

221 times: How often the average smartphone
user in the UK checks their phone every day
Tecmark

4.9 billion: Connected devices in use in 2015
Gartner

200 percent: Increase in average time spent on
mobile devices since 2012
GlobalWebIndex

49 percent: Workers who can’t choose where to
work depending on the task
Steelcase wellbeing study, global average of 17
countries

ATTENTION: THIS IS YOUR BRAIN

Dictionaries give simple definitions for attention;
in general terms, it’s about holding something in
your mind. But cognitive researchers have a much
more nuanced understanding, classifying different
types of attention based on which areas of the
brain are involved. For example, as a professor
in Sweden’s esteemed Cognitive Neuroscience
Karolinska Institute, Torkel Klingberg, M.D., Ph.D.,
delineated two distinct types: controlled attention
and stimulus-driven attention. The former is about
intentionally directing our attention; the latter is
about things that attract it.

It’s now known that there are multiple biological
mechanisms involved in attention. The prefrontal
cortex, often described as the executive center
or the CEO of the brain, is the director of our
attention. It’s the last major region to develop in
our evolutionary history, and it’s what enables us to
selectively focus on something. But neuroscientists
tell us there’s more to attention than just this one
part of our brains.

UNDERSTANDING ATTENTION:

“To understand attention, we need to think of it
holistically in terms of multiple brain functions,
but also contextual issues such as the content
our brains are processing, our physical state and
the environment,” explains Beatriz Arantes, a
WorkSpace Futures researcher and organizational
psychologist.

Our psychological state of arousal—in other words,
how alert we are—is a significant factor because
as it fluctuates, our attention fluctuates. When
we’re tired and lethargic, it’s difficult to control our
attention. When we’re highly excited, our minds
also jump from one thing to another. Sustaining our
attention depends upon a moderate, “sweet spot”
level of arousal.

Another key brain system affecting attention and
arousal is the limbic system: dispersed parts of the
brain that manage emotion. More primal than the
prefrontal cortex, the limbic system prompts us to
pay attention to stimuli that elicit fear or excitement.
John Medina, a developmental molecular biologist
at Washington State University with research
interests in human brain development, writes,
“We don’t pay attention to boring things.” In other
words, human brains respond naturally to the
unexpected, which makes us easily distractible.
Evolutionarily speaking, being attuned to changes
in our environment has been important to survival,
and we still retain those natural tendencies to
notice sounds, movements and stimuli around us.

Of course, not all distractions are external. We’re
also distracted by internal thoughts and concerns.
Neuroscientists at MIT Trey Hedden and John
Gabrieli found that internally generated lapses in
attention are activated by the medial prefrontal
cortex, a specific part of the prefrontal cortex
that’s triggered by thoughts of ourselves or other
people. The medial prefrontal cortex is part of the
brain’s default network, our naturally occurring
state of mind when we’re not focused elsewhere.
Attention is also a function of motor orientation—
how close we are to sensory stimuli affects how
closely we pay attention to them. Students who
sit close to the teacher have an easier time paying
attention that those who sit far away, people having
a conversation tend to lean in instinctively and
fix their eyes on the person who is talking—even
when that results in staring at a speakerphone
throughout a conference call.

HOW BRAINS WORK AT WORK

Most people still regard neuroscience research as
a pathway to eventual cures for mental illnesses
and disorders such as Alzheimer’s, unaware of
the possibility of any immediate impact on their
everyday lives, according to a report in the journal
Science Communication. In reality, however, just
as medical research into pathologies has produced
a wealth of findings for improving our physical
health, neuroscience research is producing
findings that have relevance for improving our
everyday cognitive functioning.

In particular, Steelcase researchers have targeted
three key findings from neuroscience that have
important implications for how we perform at work.

BRAINS GET TIRED.

It’s common to see organizations operating on
the assumption that focus is the pathway to
productivity and the goal, therefore, is to keep
people as focused as possible for at least eight
hours a day—the more, the better.

Neuroscientists, however, tell us that focus is a
limited resource. Like the rest of our bodies, our
brains consume energy, drawing on glucose and
oxygen as fuel. Controlled attention, in particular,
is very hard work, drawing heavily on the prefrontal
cortex. Activities such as analyzing, prioritizing,
planning and other types of critical thinking are
energy guzzlers. As energy supplies dwindle,
brains get tired.

Because our brains consume so much energy,
humans developed physiological mechanisms
over time to ensure that we wouldn’t waste our
finite supply. That’s why, as the prefrontal cortex
becomes taxed with a difficult or irrelevant task,
we’re more likely to become distracted. It’s a
simple energy-saving mechanism, like turning
down a thermostat. “Our brains work in cycles
of peak activity and downtime, moving between
rhythms of energy expenditure and regeneration,”
says Arantes.

“Our brains and bodies are designed to move
through these rhythms, to stay alert so we can
respond to other important environmental cues.”
Problems arise if we try to stay focused when
our brains are tired. Distractions abound, and
we end up avoiding difficult tasks, learning little,
remembering less and making mistakes. As stress
mounts, the emotionally driven “fight or flight”
syndrome kicks in, flooding the nervous system
with cortisol and adrenaline. In the resulting state
of over-arousal, instead of doing productive work,
people who are stressed become consumed by
irritation, guilt, pessimism and other unproductive
states of mind.

“Never in history has the human brain been
asked to track so many data points.”EDWARD M. HALLOWELLAUTHOR AND
PSYCHIATRIST

Noted psychiatrist and author Edward M. Hallowell
has identified a neurological phenomenon he terms
“attention deficit trait.” He says it’s a direct result
of what’s happening to people’s brains in today’s
hyperkinetic environment. “Never in history has
the human brain been asked to track so many data
points,” he says, concluding that this overloading
of the brain’s circuits is the primary reason that
smart people are underperforming at work. We’re
simply expecting more of our brains than they have
the energy to handle.

“It’s as if the brain is on a budget. If it devotes 70
percent here, then it can only devote 30 percent
there,” reports Sergei Gepshtein, a computational
neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological
Studies who researches how the brain processes
visual stimuli.

MULTITASKING ATTENTION IS
INEFFICIENT.

A persistent work trend in recent years has
been people juggling simultaneous projects
and responsibilities, each requiring frequent
collaboration with a variety of people to keep
everything moving forward. Our jobs depend on
streams of information and interaction, and our
efforts to manage everything at once have led to
widespread efforts at multitasking—responding
to emails during a meeting, reading a text in the
middle of a conversation, browsing the Web while
we’re talking on the phone, trying to accomplish
multiple tasks at the same time.

Although we’d like to believe otherwise, scientists
at places such as the Brain, Cognition and Action
Laboratory at the University of Michigan have
proven that when we think we’re multitasking,
we’re really switching our attention rapidly between
things. One exception: If multitasking involves
completely separate channels of the brain—for
example, walking (a manual task) and talking (a
verbal task)—it can be done, says David Meyer,
a faculty member at the university and one of the
world’s research experts on multitasking. But in
today’s workplaces many activities compete for
our attention, demanding “airtime” on channels in
our brain that can handle only one thing at a time.
Meyer has likened people’s distraction behaviors
of today to smoking cigarettes decades ago,
before we knew what it was doing to our lungs. In a similar way, he says, many people today aren’t
aware of how much they’re degrading their mental
processes as they attempt to multitask throughout
the day. On a small scale, this may mean errors
in our emails that make our intended meaning
unclear; on a larger scale,
it can mean a serious accident due to texting while
driving.

People today aren’t aware of how much they’re
degrading their mental processes as they
attempt to multitask throughout the day.

The direct contrast to multitasking is what
psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Ph.D.,
has famously named “flow”—being completely
immersed in a challenge over time. It’s considered
by many to be our most productive state. Flow
rarely happens by accident, and it can’t be
sustained indefinitely. During flow, however,
we’re absorbed and engaged in what we’re trying
to accomplish. Unlike stress, which releases
chemicals associated with over-arousal and fear,
flow is a highly pleasurable and highly productive
state of arousal. It’s what many employees—
and their employers—crave more of in today’s
workplaces.

MINDFULNESS TRAINS THE BRAIN.

As much as we’re attracted to the idea of flow,
actually achieving that state of mind is a bigger
challenge than ever for most workers today.
Linda Stone is a writer and consultant who coined
“continuous partial attention” almost 20 years
ago, and it has only become more prevalent since
then. Continuous partial attention is an effort not
to miss anything. “We want to effectively scan for
opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities,
activities, and contacts, in any given moment,”
Stone writes. On high alert, we feel busy and
important. When used as our dominant attention
mode, however, continuous partial attention puts
us in a constant state of crisis, making us feel
overwhelmed and unfulfilled, as well as powerless
to do anything about it. By trying to stay connected
to everything, we fail at connecting to anything in
a meaningful way.

Probably one of the most remarkable discoveries
from neuroscientists’ research is neuroplasticity
—i.e., evidence that people can physiologically
change their brains at any time of life by creating,
strengthening and consolidating neural networks.
This means that, instead of constantly succumbing
to distractions because we’re trying to hold too
many things in our minds at once, we have real
opportunities to “train the brain” into positive habits.

Mindfulness—keeping your mind turned into
the moment of here and now—appears to be
one of the best ways to accomplish this. One
of the most dramatic proofs is research led by
Richard Davidson, Ph.D., who has pioneered the
science of meditation as director of the Waisman
Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior and
the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the
University of Wisconsin–Madison. Davidson and
his team have used digital imaging to look at the
brains of Buddhist monks who had practiced
meditation intensely for years, each accumulating
more than 30,000 hours of meditation. Their
brain scans showed powerful gamma activity,
indicating intensely focused thought. In fact, the
monks’ gamma waves were 30 times as strong
as those of a control group of college students.
Instead of getting lured into distracting thoughts
or environmental stimuli, these monks had trained
themselves to focus at will.

THE BUSINESS CASE FOR
MINDFULNESS

As reported in a January 2015 Harvard Business
Review digital article, a team of scientists from the
University of British Columbia and the Chemnitz
University of Technology recently pooled data
from more than 20 studies and found that at least
eight different regions of the brain are consistently
affected by mindfulness, an increasingly practiced
method of meditation. Of particular interest to
business professionals, say the article’s three
authors, is the effect of meditation on the anterior
cingulate cortex, a region behind the frontal
lobe that is associated with self-regulation.
Research subjects who meditate showed superior
performance on tests of self-regulation and also
showed more activity in this region of the brain
than those who didn’t meditate. Another brain
region that appears to benefit from meditation is
the hippocampus, part of the limbic system that is
associated with emotion and memory.

Continuous partial attention puts us in a
constant state of crisis, making us feel
overwhelmed and unfulfilled.

Clearly, the mantra of mindfulness as a sound
business practice is beginning to take root, and not
just in Silicon Valley companies like Google, which
offers emotional intelligence courses centered on
meditation. Health insurer Aetna is among several
stalwartly buttoned-up companies that now
offer free onsite yoga and meditation classes to
employees. At The Huffington Post offices in New
York, there are nap rooms plus yoga and breathing
classes, and a policy encouraging employees not
to email after hours—all implemented after Editorin-
Chief Arianna Huffington collapsed at home
from lack of sleep, resulting in an epiphany about
the ill effects of an always-on workstyle.

Of course, spending thousands of hours every year
in mindfulness meditation isn’t a likely scenario
for office workers. But research published in the
journal Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging shows
that even as little as 30 minutes of mindfulness a
day for eight weeks can physiologically change the
brain. While making and strengthening connections
in our brains, mindfulness also reduces sensitivity
to the brain’s threat-detection network.

“Essentially, engaging in mindfulness means that
we are practicing our ability to recognize when our
minds have wandered and gaining ability to redirect
our attention. The process of nonjudgmental
observation of thought trains your brain and allows
you to calm your responses and maintain more
emotional stability. The more we practice this, the
better we get at it,” explains Arantes.

Donna Flynn
Vice PresidentWorkSpace Futures, Steelcase

Beatriz Arantes
Senior Researcher, Work-
Space Futures, Steelcase
Based in Paris, Beatriz specializes
in the psychology of
human emotions and behaviors,
and how they relate to
work and work environments.
Having recently participated
in extensive research on
wellbeing at work, she says
neuroscience provides
compelling evidence that
achieving both productivity
and wellbeing depend on
understanding and leveraging
how the brain works.Listen to
an interview with Steelcase
Senior Design Researcher
and Environmental Psychologist
Beatriz Arantes as she
discusses how to maintain
attention at work and why
working shorter hours is key
to keeping pace with work
demands today

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